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Mark Bradford’s 38-foot City of the Big Shoulders has been unveiled at the Obama Presidential Center ahead of the Jackson Park campus’s June 18 dedication.
Mark Bradford‘s towering new painting for the Obama Presidential Center got its first public walkthrough Wednesday: a 38-foot-tall canvas titled City of the Big Shoulders, climbing the full three-story west wall of the museum’s Our Story Atrium.
The Los Angeles-based artist, best known for his layered abstract compositions built from commercial materials, treats Chicago as both landscape and memory in the piece. It compresses neighborhood texture, civic friction, and the South Side’s lived history into a single saturated field.
The New York Times’ first walkthrough of the finished installation describes piercing light moving across the canvas’s patchwork, with Bradford folding fragments of the city into what the Foundation has called pressure, power, survival, and hope.
City of the Big Shoulders is one of five major commissions the Obama Foundation announced in February, joining work from Tyanna J. Buie, Jay Heikes, Carrie Mae Weems, and the Sam Kirk and Dorian Sylvain collaboration. Each artist was commissioned to make a site-specific piece for the campus.
Those five sit on top of an earlier roster the Foundation has been building for years. Maya Lin, Theaster Gates, Julie Mehretu, Alison Saar, Kiki Smith, Richard Hunt, Jenny Holzer, and a Nick Cave and Marie Watt collaboration are all already attached to permanent installations. The Foundation’s February press release listed the full artist roster across the campus.
The Center sits on 19.3 acres of Jackson Park on the South Side, adjacent to the University of Chicago. The buildings and grounds are owned by the City of Chicago under a 99-year use agreement with the Foundation. A new branch of the Chicago Public Library will share the campus.
Wikipedia’s project history tracks the long road from the 2015 site selection to the 2021 groundbreaking, with delays driven by federal review, lawsuits, and budget overruns. The tower topped out in mid-2024. The dedication is scheduled for June 18, with public access opening the following day on Juneteenth.
Bradford’s piece anchors the museum building’s central atrium and will be among the first works visitors see inside. Valerie Jarrett, CEO of the Obama Foundation, has framed the Center’s public-art program as central to how the campus tells its story.
City of the Big Shoulders is now installed. The South Side gets its first look at the full atrium on June 19.
